The smell hits you before anything else. Upon entering Manuel Mathieu’s Corner at the Arsenal at the 61st Venice Biennale, you enter a dimly lit room and are met by a warm, earthy fragrance: vetiver, sourced from Haiti, mixed with something unexpectedly comforting. It took me a moment to apply it, but its fragrant tingle eventually arrived in a specific place — the Vicks VapoRub my mother used to rub on my chest when I had a cold as a kid, that powerful, overwhelming feeling of being cared for. The immersive composition that unfolds around you, Pendulum (2025), though, is more disturbing than comforting.
Haitian-Canadian artist Mathieu is one of the few participants in this year’s Biennale to appear at both the Arsenale and the Giardini – a feat that speaks to the breadth and ambition of a practice that includes painting, mosaics, ceramics, film and the olfactory arts. Invited by the late curator Koyo Koh, whose subject matter, “In Minor Keys,” favors quiet forms of resistance over grand advertising, Matteo’s debut at the world’s most famous art gallery seems entirely calculated.
Pendulum It began as a short film in 2023 – winning the Grand Prix at FIFA that year before touring the New Orleans Film Festival, the Toronto Art Biennial and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami – before expanding into the immersive installation on view here now. At the Arsenale, it takes the form of a double-sided screen suspended in the dark space, combined with four life-sized canvas figures lying on the floor, emitting the fragrance of vetiver.
On screen, a woman in a white dress and headdress moves through the forest, the fabric of her dress dragging behind her like a wedding train. In moments, she opens the cloak wide, and spreads her arms as if she is about to fly; Other times she wraps it around herself like armor. When she described her to Matteo as the bride of history, his screen lit up. “That’s it,” he said. “What will you marry?” It is a question that the work deliberately refuses to answer. The dress itself — or an almost identical one — stands near a mannequin, a cinematic relic that suddenly becomes three-dimensional.
The film cuts and we are in the field. A group of men maneuver a large white sheet among themselves, tossing and folding it around objects that turn out to be broken dolls similar to those found in space in the Arsenal – scattered and dismembered limbs. The procedure is repetitive, exhausting, and strangely familiar. It reminded me of skydiving games from PE lessons at school, where the goal was team coordination and the rules were never entirely clear. Men don’t talk to each other. They don’t seem to communicate at all. They keep moving forward anyway. “They could stop at any time, but they don’t,” Matthew said. For him, the cycle is the message: the inability of individuals to express their inner experience to each other is precisely what makes the cycle go round.
The dolls mean different things to different people – one actor saw them as white spirits; Another was very uncomfortable to name them. For Matteo, they represent psychological burdens. The question is not what these things are, but how each person chooses to carry them. The woman who opens the film, walking with the weight of this fabric, passes it on. The men receive it and don’t know what to do with it. Sourced through the perfume house with access to materials grown in Haiti, Vetiver is designed to make you want to stay within this state of uncertainty. “A scent that hugs you,” as Matteo puts it.
The decision to pair a potentially confrontational film with something physiologically soothing is the masterstroke of the work. Matteo believes that smell bypasses the analytical brain and goes directly to memory and emotion. The fragrance also exists outside the gallery walls – Mathieu is the founder of Manuel Mathieu Parfums, and the vetiver blend is available in candle form, meaning visitors can carry not only the memory of the gallery but its atmosphere into their homes. Some will take it more literally: the scent lingers on skin and clothes long after you’ve left, which seems quite intentional to make his basic argument that history doesn’t stay where you leave it.
Moving from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the size and medium change but the preoccupations remain constant. Fitness (2023) consists of 14 vases in various stages of collapse – forms caught in a state of flux, oscillation and dissolution, as if what they once contained had already begun to slip away. It was handcrafted during its stay in Jingdezhen, China, and is intentionally imperfect, with visible marks of manufacture (artisanal hand marks) preserved on the surface. Matthew describes the heating process as a metaphor for transformation – how heat creates new forms, causes cracks, and can destroy while preserving essential elements. He noted that his team broke an entire clay kiln in the process because the work was so labor intensive. They function as artifacts, suggest buried histories rather than clarify them, and require a different kind of attention than paintings: you want to reach out and feel their weight.
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“Manuel Mateo“ |
The same earthy geological quality carries with it Abundance and drought (2024), a large-scale mosaic that reads from a distance as something dry and elemental – a fractured terrain, almost skull-like in its lines – before drawing you closer, as the patient accumulation of thousands of hand-assembled pieces gradually reveals itself. The work was developed as part of research conducted by Le Mont Habété, Mathieu’s permanent commission for five massive mosaics of Montreal’s REM transit network. “Slowness is not imposed, but stems from the inherent complexity of the work,” Matthew said. Both works share a sense of time that emerges in the material – the work is the meaning – and in the context of an exhibition that often rewards spectacle and speed, this feels as much like an attitude as a process.
The paintings surrounding it –Self preservation (2025), In the heart of the second revolution (2025) and new Genocide (2026) – made from layers of fabric, paper, paint and, increasingly, burnt canvas, a material that Matteo has been incorporating into his practice over the past several years. The window (2025) and Hijab (2025) both use suspended strips of fabric alongside or embedded in the painted surface, creating thresholds rather than static images: the figures appear distorted, as if they were seen through glass or through the strip of memory itself. in Hijabthe burned cotton is pressed directly onto the paint, obscuring and perforating the image underneath. Fabric carries a specific historical charge – cotton is inseparable from the economics of enslaved labor – and to burn it is to reject its original function, to transform the material of exploitation into something else: a scar, a tear, a rejection.
Genocide It stopped me in my tracks – not least because of the context in which I encountered it. The day before the official opening of the Biennale, the Art Not Genocide coalition coordinated strikes across at least a dozen national pavilions to protest Israel’s participation. Moving from that charged atmosphere into a room containing a painting bearing that title—its surface structured like a deteriorating grid of archival images, faces pressing through layers of fragile paper only to dissolve into abstraction—was like feeling the weight of the word in real time. At the bottom of the right side of the canvas, suspended by a black thread, is an object curved like a scythe, but with a certain quality of bone line. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, and Matteo seemed content to leave it that way. “It could be a tool, it could be a remnant of that violence — a result of that violence,” he said. The mystery is the point: whether it was an instrument of murder or its remains, something really happened here.
“It’s an erasure tool that’s being used more these days than ever before,” Matthew said pointedly when we spoke. The painting does not illustrate a single event, but places the genocide within a longer continuum, linking photographic documentation of atrocities to their gradual failure to retain meaning over time: images fade and records become illegible. The faces beneath the surface are present but unrecognizable, echoing Matteo’s earlier work. 1954 / Flats and Sharps (2016), which refers to the year François Duvalier came to power in Haiti, and its colorful forms punctured by black, sandy voids that act as visual black holes, represent lives and narratives erased by violence. Genocide This grammar extends to the present tense. For Matteo, these are not separate histories, but rather a single pattern, repeated under different names, in different geographical areas and across the centuries.
His practices, in both places, insist that history is not the past. It is a cycle—like the men in the field, like the recurring structures of domination he traces from Haiti’s dictatorship to contemporary violence—that continues until someone finds the language to name it, or better yet, stop it. Whether art can provide that language is a question he wisely leaves open. What it can do, this exhibition convincingly argues, is make the episode visible: in the weight of a ceramic bowl, in the slow buildup of mosaic tiles, in a piece of burned cotton pressed onto paint, in the fragrance it carries out of the building and into the world.
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